post-internet dysfunction

Menu

Once you have assembled your drawbot and got it working on a small scale, you can start experimenting.

Find a suitable wall / board that you can draw on, and attach two screw in the top two corners. You can place the drawbot on the floor and run the threads up and over the two screws – hugely increasing your drawing area.

Note that you may need to add two more screw in the bottom corners of your drawing area, to stop the threads from fouling on the pen holder when it is drawing low down. Remember to change the machine width and page sizes in the controller software!

Once you have finished assembling your drawbot kit, you will need to set up the software to get it working. To start with I’d recommend heading over to Sandy Noble’s polargraph site, downloading his software and following his instructable to get it working / the forum for further help.

The booklet design also includes a laser cut clamp that holds a pad of paper in place. This design is also very cool – and easily overlooked as the hinge is more prominent in the overall design. It wasn’t until I started cutting the booklets and assembling them myself that I realised just how cool the pad clamp is too.

Whilst glueing the clamps onto the booklet covers, I came across a problem. Ideally, you should weigh down or somehow clamp the pieces of plywood you are glueing together to ensure a secure fix. I was struggling to find lots of suitable weights, meaning I could only glue 5 booklets or so at a time.

My thoughts turned to the plywood clamp – perhaps it could be modified to suit my needs – a clamp to secure the pad clamp whilst glueing. I set about trying some designs – rapid prototyping – until I came up with a working design.

As you can see, it took quite a few attempts to get a nicely working design. Problems / things encountered include:

- Enough leverage to make clamp easy to position

- Including a jig part to line up the pad clamp correctly

- Adding holes to allow bolting two clamps together (later ignored, not necessary)

- Removing ‘teeth’ – they were marking the plywood cover and pad clamps and not needed for this application

- Rounding corners for ergonomics

This design process was fun and now I can cut my own clamps from the same material as the end product. Working like this has made me think a lot about how having access to the laser cutter has changed the way I do things. I wouldn’t have been able to work through as many revisions as quickly as this if I had to send the design off to be cut and returned for testing. This may lead to careless / lazy prototyping as the cost of testing a new design is cheap. Is this a bad thing? Should I be a more disciplined designer? Should I strive to get something right in, say 5 revisions or less? Or should I embrace this way of working?

Like many projects, I have ended up making many revisions / versions of my drawbots. First, there was David, then Derek, then Doris, Delilah is the latest, and next up is Deirdre [can you spot a theme?].

There are many problems/issues/obstacles/characterful niggles that one comes across when building a drawing robot. I won’t list them here – take a look through the polargraph forums, or have a go at making your own to find out!

One challenge is the pen holder:

must hold pen securely enough for drawing

nice if can change pen easily

needs to also hold servo to lift pen

detachable from holding wires for transportability

place to attach weight

Early experiments by Matthew and Sandy addressed some of these problems, but often included extra / hard to find parts, or more expensive parts, etc. Then Sandy (I think) came across Mr Drew’s pen holder (name of a drawbot by Darcy Whyte of mambohead.com ) and put it up on his own site.

There are pros and cons to different designs of pen holder / gondola – I was keen to address some of the cons of the holders I have been using and seeing how my own changes affected performance / usability.

Bigup Darcy and mambohead for sharing their Mr Drew pen holder! I can’t find the original file link, but Sandy has it up on his google code hosting (sketchup file) here:

Files

All files above are shared under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license – for more details see the Creative Commons website.

Other hardware

In addition to the laser cut parts (I used 3mm sheet stock), you will also need:

2x M3 40mm machine screws

2x M3 16mm machine screws

4x M3 nuts

10x M3 nylon washers (optional)

1x small spring

1x micro servo

drawbot, pen, etc etc

Big nice to Matt Venn, Sandy Noble and the many other drawbot / polargraph people doing lovely things.

UPDATE - fatter pens

My first revised version could hold Sharpies but I got hold of some fatter markers that I wanted to try, so I did some more tweaks and have two other versions available – one that can take pens up to ~20mm in diameter and another that can take up to ~28mm diameter (pretty chunky markers).

Working with Full Circle Arts to lead an experimental design project based upon a shared laser cutting technique from SNIJ lab in Rotterdam.

Cutting a series of parellel / offset lines into sheet plywood makes it flexible. SNIJ labs designed these booklets then shared the design under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license. I wanted to experiment with a wiki and design project / competition based around this nice technique.

Aims:

- What happens when a design is shared under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license

- How [many] people contribute to a wiki and what happens when they do

I am fascinated by sound and how it can trigger memory – I don’t think it’s as evocative as smells can be but it’s easier to record + reproduce, and AudioBoo provided me with a quick and convenient way to start this project.

After starting the 60second project I found out about the UK sound map project – led by the British Library and the Noise Futures Network. I started adding my recordings to the sound map – you can add yours by adding the #uksm tag to your ‘boos.